Emily Dickinson is certainly not an "overlooked poet" but she was very prolific and many of her poems are seldom read. When I was preparing a presentation on Dickinson for the 1999 Modernism conference, I came upon a striking poem I’d encountered. It's numbered 1712 by Johnson and 508 by Franklin. (I am using the Johnson version.) The date of composition is uncertain, but it was first published in Bolts of Melody (1945) edited by Mabel Todd. No autograph copy of the poem now exists. This raises the theoretical question of whether it is genuine. To me it seems likely enough that it is. Who but Dickinson could have been so intense, so peculiar, so bold?

As everyone knows, Dickinson was obsessed by mortality and by questions of faith. This poem puts those concerns in relentless conjunction/collision. The reader is sent in a dizzying "circuit" or oscillation between "Pit" and "Heaven." Dickinson uses the word "pit" four times and "heaven" five yet "pit" predominates. It is the only one of the pair to make it into the third stanza. We need to stop and imagine this pit. Is it hell or is it the grave; in other words, is it theological or physical? Is it heaven where God reigns or is it the sky above and around the earth? The poem, at least as I see it, oscillates violently between these readings.

The poem begins with what sounds like a conventional message of consolation, Christianity’s response to death or evil. There is "A Pit -- but Heaven over it -/ And Heaven beside and Heaven abroad,/" but the third line pivots hard away from consolation: "And yet a Pit-". The "but" of the first line is reversed with a telling "yet."

In the second stanza the speaker is immobilized over the pit -- or is she already in her grave? She can't stir, she can't look, she can't even dream. She can only wait, a still point of blank concentration. "To dream -- to sap the Prop/that holds my chances up." Those are some of the most mysterious and interesting lines in the poem. What is this "Prop?" It sounds almost comically material and artificial, a lever to hoist the speaker's hopes above the pit of despair? Flimsy as a theatrical prop, it is threatened with collapse. (What would Lacan say?)

And beginning in the third stanza, her attention is drawn downward: "The depth is all my thought-" "It was a Pit -- with fathoms under it-". Lines like this make me shiver. Now an abyss opens below the pit to match the heaven above. "Its Circuit just the same." The poem ends with a tolling boom of sound-alike words: "Whose Doom to whom?" Identity becomes irrelevant here, lost among circulating echoes.

This may not be Dickinson's best poem but it fascinates me. It's so grotesquely comic as "we" (the first person becomes plural in the last stanza) are frightened into practicing good posture in or just over an abyss. This is Dickinson's own brand of gallows humor. She is scared and scary at the same time, a high voltage closed circuit.